Cheney, Biden to meet privately at Naval Observatory

 Vice President Dick Cheney, getting ready to hand off the job as the nation's second-in-command, will sit down with Vice President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday at the Naval Observatory.

Cheney spokeswoman Megan Mitchell said Cheney and his wife, Lynne, have invited Biden and his wife, Jill, to their home at the observatory, the vice presidential residence. The meeting on the vice presidential transition follows the historic meeting President Bush had Monday with President-elect Obama.

"The Cheneys and the Bidens will have a private meeting and then tour the residence," Mitchell said.

The meeting will be more of a social call between Cheney and Biden, who both are steeped in foreign policy and national security issues.

Biden, who has been chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has a grounding in both foreign and domestic affairs honed over more than three decades in politics. Cheney is known as a chief architect of the war in Iraq and a hard-liner when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.

With no clearcut job description for the vice president, Cheney has said that the role of his successors depend on the wishes of future presidents. Cheney himself isn't sure whether future vice presidents will be as hands-on as he's been. "I'm reluctant to say it's a trend," Cheney told reporters during an interview in Israel in March. "If you look at the history of the office, it can go either way."

"You go back and look at how it's developed over the years, it wasn't until really, I guess, Richard Nixon was vice president that he even had an office downtown," Cheney said. "Harry Truman's office was on Capitol Hill."

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